mediajunk

Refusing to use Gmail due to privacy concerns? It may not make a difference; no matter who provides your email, they have the right to read it -- at least if that provider is based in the US. In another worrying development in the troubled domain of email privacy, a US court has ruled that a provider of an email service "did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions" (Wired News). "Councilman, owner of a website selling rare and out-of-print books, offered book-dealer customers e-mail accounts through his site. But unknown to those customers, Councilman installed code that intercepted and copied any e-mail that came to them from his competitor, Amazon.com. "Although Councilman did not prevent the mail from reaching recipients, he read thousands of copied messages in order to know what books customers were seeking and gain a commercial advantage over Amazon. " The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts reached its decision through the Wiretap Act which, it acknowledged, "is perhaps inadequate to address modern communication methods". So, if don't have a US-based email provider, is your privacy protected? Sure, so long as you don't send or receive an email from anyone with a US-based provider ... like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.!